NEWS BRIEFS
Paris, FRANCE — Showing further evidence of its industry-leading expertise in performance, reliability and scalability of e-infrastructure servers, Bull announced that it is the first vendor to have successfully ported and run AIX 5L on a 16-way Intel Itanium processor-based server. This achievement is another industry first, following Bull’s June announcement of the world’s first successful porting of AIX to an 8-way IA-64 server.
Meanwhile, the company is already working with leading ISV partners to assist them in porting their applications to the new IA-64 platform. These partners include: Baan (an Invensys company specializing in ERP, supply chain management, B2B, CRM software), BEA Systems, Inc. (The E-Commerce Transactions Company), Centura Software Corp. (mobile enterprise solutions), Daleen Technologies (Internet-enabled customer management and billing for data and communications providers), DST Innovis (customer management and billing for the video/broadband, telecommunications and utility industries), Eastman Software (process management), Evidian (secure e-infrastructure management software) and Roxen Internet Software (Web servers).
“This successful port and our ongoing work with our software partners clearly demonstrates our technical expertise and our commitment to the latest evolutions in the IA-64 arena,” said Jean-Philippe Chiarella, vice president Open Systems, Bull. “Our goal is to deliver scalable e-infrastructures for the most demanding applications as soon as Itanium becomes commercially available.”
“Bull’s achievement in demonstrating AIX 5L on an IA-64 system shows its determination to become a major player in the ‘scale up’ story for IA64 based servers,” said Martin Hingley, vice president, European systems group, IDC. “It has already a long history of providing clustered SMP machines and has contributed important components to IBM’s AIX operating system over the years. With its Application Solution Center, Bull is also helping with the conversion of leading ISV software to IA-64. Getting suitable software in place early on is vital to the success of IA-64 servers.”
AIX5L derives from the Project Monterey UNIX operating system initiative led by IBM, Intel and SCO and supported by key OEMs such as Bull to extend the enterprise strengths of AIX to the Intel IA-64 architecture. Bull’s main contribution to the AIX5L operating system is in the development of its scalability and workload management capabilities. Bull has been a significant contributor to prior versions of AIX in partnership with IBM.
“Our active participation in the evolution of AIX will enable our customers and partners to deploy their mission-critical applications on an increasingly wide range of infrastructures including both the Power PC and IA-64 and also leverage applications written for Linux,” added Chiarella. “This firmly positions AIX as the leading UNIX operating system for enterprise customers.”
“We are very pleased with Bull’s contribution and their pioneering work in developing and improving scalability of AIX 5L,” said Ross Mauri, vice president, UNIX software, IBM Corporation. “We value our long-lasting relationship with Bull on AIX for Power and we look forward to continuing it with AIX for IA-64.”
Bull is an international IT Group that operates in more than 100 countries. In 1999, the company earned revenues of 3.8 billion Euros with over 65% outside of France, its country of origin. For more information, visit the Bull Web site: http://www.bull.com .
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